When compassion moves your soul…

Compassion moves us when we see others facing life’s toughest moments - and assures us that despite everything that’s wrong with this world, there are also moments of hope that assures humanity is not dead - not yet at least. For those of us who yearn to find that place of assurance, it is there.

The outpouring of sympathy by the Indian public for the twins joined at the hip at birth and abandoned by parents who could not afford the cost of surgery, was one such moment that brought a country in a moment of empathy for them. A team of medical specialists from India and Australia, supported by nursing staff, had performed the operation successfully. They had also managed to convince the parents to take the children back. In a country where girl babies are aborted routinely and villagers like to condemn disfigured or abnormal children as bad omens, the story of the girls come as a breath of fresh air.

What makes us human lies within all of us. We just need to find it - for some of us, nothing moves our spirit which is sad. Some will not be touched easily by another’s tragedy. Yet for so many others, they will be moved by another’s plight and will want to do something to change it for the better.

Easy money

For the Indian girls who were joined at the hip, they have given hope to many others whose lives can be changed by a similar outpouring of compassion. Here in Sri Lanka, we see this all the time but some of us are weary about such claims because people in today’s money driven society tend to cheat so much. It is not uncommon to see mothers holding infants and toddlers begging at city junctions - their eyes glassy from some kind of substance abuse, their children constantly asleep probably drugged or given some form of medicine to make them sleep. So you wonder - is my sense of compassion misplaced?

Yet for every trickster, there are genuine people who need surgical interventions to save their lives - or those who need some form of support to recover from illness or life threatening circumstances. Too often, a generous offer is mistreated when the recipient tries to live off charity for life - it is easy for such people to be driven by a hunger for easy money. Yet there are others who, when given a fishing rod instead of a fish, will build a source of livelihood.

Some prefer a hand out or evoking a sense of sympathy in place of hard work. Hand outs cannot last but they somehow find innovative ways of obtaining sympathy followed by monetary help. It can also arise out of a tragedy - as we witnessed following the tsunami. For some, the compassion shown by their countrymen was an opportunity to grab material benefits. There are others who genuinely benefitted from the benevolence shown.

Materialistic world

It is the same level of compassion that drives us to give a few rupees to someone begging outside our door. Although it is ideally not our concern to worry about what they do with it - even though we know for sure that most of those who beg are employed by beggar mudalalis who run beggar rings - I would like to know and take comfort in knowing that my charity was not misused nor my compassion taken for granted.

There is a place for rightly placed charity in our hearts. Despite the swindlers, the opportunists, the fakes, human heart still beats with a drop of compassion that balances out an otherwise materialistic world.

We have become so accustomed to looking at the world through a looking glass that usually only shows the material benefits - the new car, the new clothes, the new house etc. Yet all of that pales into insignificance when you are given the opportunity to engage in a justifying act of charity towards someone who may not know where his next meal is coming from.

Let’s set our hearts on doing good - at least one act of charity a month. We do not always have to give money - we can also give our time, our effort, our ear and ourselves.